Picturing John Henry Bartlett

I first met John Henry Bartlett (1869-1952) in a vintage bookstore. He was long deceased when I picked up a copy of his small book “A Synoptic History of the Granite State.” Bad title, I thought. “Synoptic” is a fancy biblical way of saying “summary.” He should have called it “A Brief History of the Granite State,” But I bought it anyway. 

Before Wikipedia, I used to refer to Bartlett’s little book when I wanted to see a quick visual history of the governors of New Hampshire. The book came out in 1939, so there were a lot of governors missing and all those depicted were men. For the record, if you count colonial governors, according to Wikipedia, New Hampshire had SEVENTY-SEVEN male governors before we elected Jeanne Shaheen in 1997. We’ve had only one more female governor since. 

But back to Bartlett. The author of 10 books (including “Folks is Folks” and” “Spice for Speeches”) John H. Bartlett was also a Granite State governor. He served for only two years from 1919 to 1921. Not much happened during his administration, but he did  sign  a law designating the purple lilac as the state flower.  Bartlett later became president of the US Civil Service Commission and was appointed US Assistant Postmaster General.  

I didn’t bump into Gov. Bartlett again until–while writing my book about the Music Hall–I realized he was from Portsmouth, sort of. Born in Sunapee, he graduated from Dartmouth. Bartlett then taught at Portsmouth High School for four years, doubling as  principal for two years. Then he got political. While teaching, John Bartlett studied law with the influential local Judge Calvin Page, an associate of ale tycoon Frank Jones.. The two men became law partners and John married Page’s daughter Agnes.  According to his bio, Bartlett was a Unitarian, a Republican (although he later switched to Democrat), and amember of the Knights Templar. 

But he was also a local movie mogul. It was Bartlett, I was surprised to learn, who built the gorgeous and now defunct Olympia Theatre on Vaughan Street (now Vaughan Maal) in 1917. And it was Bartlett who realized that Portsmouth had too many downtown theaters for its own good back then. So he and a partner formed the Allied Theatres Company in 1918. The company managed all the vaudeville and film shows at the Olympia, The Colonial, the Arcadia, the Portsmouth Theatre (Music Hall), and the Scenic Temple. 

My Photoshop homage this week shows Bartlett at various periods of his life. He is buried in Portsmouth’s Harmony Grove cemetery.   

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson